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Fellatio has long been part of the rich tapestry of politics worldwide. For anyone alive and cognizant during the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s licentious escapades with Monica Lewinsky will forever color (or taint, depending on your perspective) the image of the American White House. Earlier this week, on May 13, 2013, opposition figure Maria Baronova penned an open letter [ru] to writer and political dissident Eduard Limonov, wherein she dropped a sexual bombshell of her own. Her text unabashedly refers to “masturbating in the shower” and credits Limonov—whose works [ru] are famous for their intricate descriptions of lewd sex acts—with teaching her (through his books) how to “suck dick” “without false modesty” and “fuck like an animal.” Baronova’s letter included a great deal more than these offhand sexual remarks, though it is those remarks that undoubtedly explain the online backlash that followed.

This week has been unusually cruel to women on Russian Twitter. In addition to the wave of sexist jokes that washed up after the RuNet learned about film star Angelina Jolie’s preventative double mastectomy, many Russian netizens took Baronova’s sexual revelations as an invitation to attack her specifically and female public figures more broadly.

Some of the insults came from the usual suspects, like tabloid editor Ashot Gabrelyanov, who proposed [ru] on Twitter that Jolie auction off for charity her removed breasts on eBay. Also joining the fun, however, was one of Pussy Riot’s lawyers—the infamously unpleasant Mark Feygin—who mused in a (now deleted) tweet:

Anna Veduta is a better-raised young woman than Maria Barnova, therefore she doesn’t tell us what she’s learned from Alexey Navalny.

One of the many demotivators that appeared, following Baronova's open letter.

Demotivators soon popped up online, such as an image [ru] featuring Limonov above the text: “He taught Maria Baronova to suck dick. And what have you done today?” Another popular mash-up (see image to the right), which Baronova herself retweeted, included a photo of her riding a scooter below another picture of a blonde woman sitting in an expensive convertible. The caption is the Karl Marx quote: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” (The joke is that Baronova’s “ability” only earned her a scooter, rather than a sports car.)

In truth, Baronova, apart from the whole Bolotnaya [oppositionist] clique, deserves respect. She alone has honestly confessed that she sucks. The others suck, too, but they conceal it.

The LJ cesspool

On LiveJournal, where an absence of character limits accompanies the bravery of online anonymity, commentary was more substantive, but no less harsh.

A May 14 post [ru] by music critic Artem Rondarev functioned as a sort of beacon for Baronova’s critics, many of whom argued vociferously that politics is no place for raunchy women. In the comments to his post, Rondarev explained [ru] his position on Baronova’s lack of sexual modesty in her public prose, interpreting her lewdness as an endorsement of anarchy:

[…] in the case of Masha, I just tried to explain the simple idea that it’s impossible to live in society and [simultaneously] be free from it. One might not like everything about it, but the dilemma is simple: it’s either society with its conventions, or you’re in Somalia. Because, you see, tomorrow you’ll have an upstairs neighbor blasting rap music all night long at top volume, and when you go up to confront him, he’ll say that this is his means of self-expression, and you’re just a prude who sleeps at night, while all the free people listen to rap. Well?

In another comment [ru] on Rondarev’s post, LiveJournal user pervert_tanuki called Baronova “a furious attention whore,” to which Rondarev responded [ru] less than charitably:

Again—I’m not searching for Masha’s motivation. She’s obviously shallow […] It’s understandable that a young woman wants to screw; I’m interested, to put it crudely, in why similar girls always want precisely to screw, and not to read books.

Several bloggers have concluded that Baronova’s vulgarity damages any chances she has at a career [ru] in politics. In separate posts on LiveJournal, user haeldar [ru] and Google+ user mc project [ru] proposed a scenario thirty years in the future, where Baronova is now a Duma deputy serving a post-Putin Russian democracy. According to the plot, the now stately Baronova proposes some piece of moralist legislation (for example, banning sex robots), only to remind the public that “Maria Baronova in her youth was not above getting fucked in every hole.”

Even Kirill Goncharov, leader of the youth wing of Russia’s oldest liberal political party, joked on Twitter:

Baronova stirred up Twitter. Now the most popular question to female politicians will be the question about their relationship to Eduard Limonov’s books

In one comment thread [ru] on LiveJournal, a group of netizens even thought it fair to compare Baronova’s talk of oral sex to Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s participation in a public orgy. They even connected Baronova and Tolokonnikova to Cicciolina, the famed pornstar and member of the Italian parliament in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Baronova’s guile?

Not everyone deplored Baronova for her letter to Limonov, however. Many bloggers seemed willing to accept that her use of vulgarity was a cunning, if shrewd, ploy to gain an audience. Indeed, Norway-based Facebook user Andrew Voronkov observed [ru]:

1. The contents of the text cannot be reduced just to sucking dick, though everyone is quoting exactly that phrase.
2. On the other hand, the girl obviously understood that everyone would quote exactly that.
3. [Limonov’s] novel “It’s Me, Eddie” is remembered more than anything for the scene where he sucks the dick of a black man … and nothing more.
4. And he [Limonov] taught her things necessary and useful…

Even some of Baronova’s critics felt compelled to acknowledge her letter’s publicity success. In a long response [ru] published the day after Baronova’s text, Pavel Zherebin (a member of Limonov’s NatsBol movement) offered the following measured praise:

This article will become famous because Maria used an ingenuous approach—a shocking tone that touches on extremely sexual issues. Until now, political journalism was free from promoting its ideas by such methods. Therefore, we can only applaud Maria—she’s a brave innovator who decided not just to fill her article to the edges with female genderness, but also to express that genderness in plain speak, in the most sincere and exciting expressions.

In a comment [ru] on Rondarev’s blog, Baronova herself confirmed that she consciously employed gender as a means to generate a larger dialogue (about both Limonov and women in contemporary Russian politics):

The purpose of the letter was to get a reaction from the public and rattle it up. This society is mostly reactionary and conservative. My goal has been reached entirely. I got tons of shit and chuckles: “WEEEENIE.” From there, [though], people discuss. A discussion arose. Eventually, everyone comes to something all their own, and for me it’s nice that people will realize something important (and something deeply their own). End of story.

Not everyone is a hater

Many bloggers, of course, refused to attack Baronova, and some rallied to her defense. Journalist Arina Kholina, for instance, credited her in a Facebook post [ru] with capturing the collective experience of a generation of Russian women:

I don’t know why everyone is ripping into Masha Baronova. She was being honest. Limonov’s book about Eddie, it’s true, was one of the sexual experiences of adolescence. Especially after the USSR. Masha had the courage the write about it. Okay, it turned out a little clumsy. Maybe, of course, particularly mature or intelligent people read about something entirely different, but when I was 16-years-old, I was thinking about sex. And, yes, in a sense, it was a sort of textbook. Probably, if Masha had written that the book taught her how to sew a lace shirt [another part of It’s Me, Eddie], everyone would just melt for her. But she, without shame, wrote about blowjobs.

Opposition activist Ilya Yashin tried to relocate the focus of RuNet mockery to government officials, tweeting:

It’s like Evgeny Feldman wrote [ru] today: “Limonov taught Baronova to suck d**k, but Putin taught the whole country.” Once again, a man can write about sex quite freely, but for women in Russia it’s still a semi-prohibited topic. Especially if you’re involved in politics, [you, as a woman,] must at all times observe certain confines, within which, in fact, nobody has lived for a long time.

Baronova identifies a cultural contradiction that is hardly unique to Russia. Certainly, the perseverance of sexist “confines” plagues societies the world over, no matter how developed or humane the civilization. The Internet response to Baronova’s talk of sex, whether one reads her text as a raised fist to patriarchy or a frivolous attempt at self-promotion, reveals that prejudices against freewheeling women enjoy widespread popularity among Russian netizens. That said, Baronova’s own audacity over the last 18 months—and the prospect of decades more to follow—promises to keep Russia’s male chauvinists busy indeed.